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There have been many notable
cartoon cats over the decades, from Krazy and Felix to the cats of Gorey and
Kliban, from Skippy and Cicero’s Cat to the cat in Polly and Her Pals, from Tom of Tom and Jerry to Warner Brothers’
Sylvester, from Disney’s Figaro in Pinocchio
and the two Siamese in Lady and the Tramp
to the underground comics’ Fat Freddy’s Cat and Pat of Nard and Pat – to today’s Garfield and Mooch of Mutts. And then there is Bucky,
single-fanged master of mayhem and eternal failure in his many and varied
self-aggrandizing plots in Get Fuzzy.
Bucky is so modern that he is almost post-modern: a self-proclaimed political conservative
in an ultra-liberal household, where his foils are Satchel Pooch (who, despite
being rather dim, outwits Bucky constantly, or at least outlasts Bucky’s
schemes) and alleged pet owner Rob Wilco (the strip’s weakest, most feckless
and arguably most unintelligent character, who at most provides a modicum of stability
amid the various antics). Get Fuzzy
has become, over the years, a more and more verbal strip – Bucky’s elaborate,
always bizarre plans need more and more verbiage, and Satchel’s mangling of
language through misunderstandings that somehow make perfect sense also
requires lots of word balloons. Thus, when Bucky’s delusions of grandeur lead
him to say that today he is “a humble, misunderstood genius,” but that tomorrow
“my name will be synonymous with power,” Satchel cannot figure out why Bucky
wants his middle name to be “with” and suggests “synonymous Austin Power” would
be better. Get Fuzzy is like that –
you have to follow the verbal byplay and ins and outs of pop-culture references
to make sense of the strip. Again: when Bucky, in his typical arrogance and
self-importance, misstates a proverb as “the weak enemy of my strong enemy, I
will pretend to befriend,” Satchel can only comment, “That verb isn’t so
‘pro.’” These bits of byplay occur, in Clean
Up on Aisle Stupid, in the context of stories that go on longer and are better
tied together than in previous Get Fuzzy
collections. There is one series of strips that starts when Bucky meets “the
keeper of the keeper of the secret” of “the bowl of eternal salmon treats,”
which it turns out that Satchel already knows about – and it isn’t eternal,
just really big, thanks to Costco. There is one sequence in which Satchel
becomes a writer for the “Daily Crate Liner” newspaper, which is published
“annually. Unless we forget. Then it’s semi-annual. But we slept through last
year’s date, and the year before that, Moby’s printer was out of ink. So we
print it every four years.” There are still occasional individual strips that
tie to what may be called the ethos of Get
Fuzzy without being part of a continuing story, such as one in which Rob
and Satchel happen upon Bucky doing something incomprehensible that involves
baseball caps, a large pot, a vacuum cleaner, stuffed animals and various knickknacks
and other objects: Bucky says “this isn’t what it looks like” and Rob, in one
of his few useful lines in the book, says, “Dude, it isn’t what anything looks
like.” Get Fuzzy takes some getting
used to – hey, it’s about a dog, cat and human sharing living space, after all,
not to mention the other cats and other dogs and occasional ferrets that
populate the environs. But this particular dog and cat really are beyond the
pale, or outside the norm, or something of that ilk. Just consider Bucky asking
Satchel what superpower Satchel would pick if he could have one, and Satchel
responding that he would take America and that Bucky shouldn’t be tricked into
taking Mongolia. The whole superpower sequence only gets more convoluted after
that – even when Bucky is able to get Satchel to understand what he means by
“superpower,” as in “special power of a superhero.” Thanks partly to the
increasing intricacy of the wordplay and partly to there being less of Rob in
this collection than in prior ones, Clean
Up on Aisle Stupid is among Conley’s best.

Young readers need a cat
much easier to follow, understand and enjoy than Bucky, and that is where James
Dean’s Pete the Cat comes in. Two new (+++) books about Pete will be enjoyable
for existing fans of the big-eyed, sleepy-looking cat with a fondness for music
and the ability to have all sorts of mild adventures. The plot of Pete the Cat: Robo-Pete is typically simple, with Pete wanting to
play baseball but finding that all his cat friends are busy doing other things.
So Pete invents a robot that will do whatever Pete wants, and that works out
just fine for a while – until trouble arises when the robot does things too
well (using a homing device to win at hide-and-seek, a jet pack to speed away
on a skateboard, and so on). Eventually Pete decides that he would rather do
things, any things, with his friends,
than with the robot, which ends up helping everyone out and then joining in
playtime, so of course all ends happily. There is a page of stickers, more than
30 in all, bound into the book, so Pete’s fans have something to play with here
as well as something to read. Like other Pete the Cat books, this one is mildly
adventurous and mildly amusing, fun for those who enjoy Pete as a character and
find that the easy-to-learn lessons, like the one here about friendship, are
not too cloying.

Instead of stickers, Pete the Cat’s Big Doodle & Draw Book
offers 128 black-and-white pages to color – and a number of simple puzzles to
solve. Dean carefully tells Pete’s fans what to do: on a book Pete is reading,
draw a cover; make a picture on an easel; connect the dots to make various
pictures; decorate a flag for Pete to plant on the Moon, then draw your own
flag; find various things that do not belong (such as shoes, a flower and a
clock in a refrigerator); match identical pictures before coloring them; solve
easy mazes; and so on. Since everything here is Pete-themed, the book will be
fun for kids who just can’t get enough of this particular cartoon feline. And
even though the puzzles are quite simple, Dean is good enough to include the
solutions at the end of the book – to avoid frustrating kids in the 4-8 age
range, who are the targets for Pete’s adventures. For them, the book is a good
combination of puzzles, pictures to color and white space in which to let their
imagination roam a bit while following Dean’s instructions – for instance, he
offers a picture of Pete at the beach to color, and on the next page provides a
big blank space in which kids can draw their own sand castle to replace the one
that Pete built and a wave knocked down. Neither Pete the Cat’s Big Doodle & Draw Book nor Pete the Cat: Robo-Pete will likely entice kids who are not already
fans of Pete to begin reading the books about him. But for those who have seen
Pete elsewhere and are looking for more of the same – with some participatory
elements in the form of stickers, drawings and puzzles – these books will offer
a plenty of Pete-focused fun.